Tropical Heat

CHAPTER 14

Solarville’s Police Headquarters had once been somebody’s home. The ordinary problems of life had been shared there, solved or not solved, and probably children had romped and brooded to maturity within its shelter. Now the inside of the low white house had been purged of hominess and rearranged into a booking area and offices. Carver figured Chief Armont’s office was in what had once been the master bedroom. There was what appeared to be a closet door on one wall, on another a window that looked out on a sloping stretch of ground ending at a tall chain-link fence bordering the backyard of the house in the next block.

Behind the fence a large black and tan Doberman pinscher paced like a caged dark spirit, as if contemplating escape for malicious purposes, or daring anyone to come into the yard. Carver wondered why someone whose house backed up to police headquarters thought they needed a watchdog.

“That’s King,” Armont said, noticing Carver looking out the window at the dog. “He looks tough but he’s a marshmallow.” He stared speculatively at Carver. “How about you? Are you really a marshmallow?”

“Do I look tough?”

“Yeah. Even with the cane.”

“You look tough, too. Even without the cane.”

The chief paced around the room for a while, not so unlike a chunky counterpart of the unimaginatively named King. His tie was loosened, and his short-sleeved white shirt had crescents of dampness beneath the arms. He wasn’t compatible with the climate of his town. His thick arms were layered with muscle. As he paced, his stomach paunch preceded him aggressively like the confident prow of a ship. He looked like a square-fisted, solid cop, all right, and Carver suspected that his center was as hard as his exterior.

“That fire last night,” Armont said, “it wasn’t necessarily accidental. You said you were here on business. Anybody in town have a motive to try to barbecue you?”

“I doubt it. I just arrived yesterday.”

Armont stopped his restless roaming, then sat on the edge of his desk and crossed his arms, propping them on the shelf of his stomach. “Why are you here, Mr. Carver?”

Carver told him, mentioning the possible connection between Sam Cahill and Willis Davis, but not between Cahill and drugs. Maybe Cahill wasn’t involved in drug trafficking. Or maybe he was and Chief Armont knew it. Right now, it was a box better left unopened.

“No sign of this Davis around here,” Armont said. “Any stranger draws at least some attention in a town like Solarville. Nobody fitting Davis’s description, vague and average as it is, has set down around here.” He spoke as if he knew everything that went on in and around Solarville. He probably did.

“What can you tell me about Sam Cahill?” Carver asked.

Armont shrugged; the powerful muscles in his arms danced. Carver thought it was a shame he didn’t have one of those tattoos of a hula girl on his forearm, so the girl could wriggle when the muscle did. “He’s been here about six months. Deals in real estate out of a home and office he rents out on Pond Road. Drives a fancy red car. Got himself some money.”

“It there enough real estate dealt around here to make it worth his while?” Carver asked.

“There might be. And he talks now and again about building a subdivision outside the north edge of town. He could be serious; ground’s flat out there, and fairly dry.” The arms resting on the stomach paunch unfolded. Armont gripped the desk edge with thick, gnarled fingers. Carver had seen fingers like that on an old major-league catcher. “You musta checked on Cahill,” the chief said. “He got any priors?”

Carver knew Armont could easily run his own check on Cahill; this was a test of cooperation. Carver cooperated. “A nine-year-old assault conviction,” he said. “Never served time. It was a domestic fracas; a husband came home at the wrong time and caused a problem. Cahill tried to solve the problem with a lamp. Used it as a club. The traditional blunt instrument.”

“Humph. He’s been quiet enough here. Maybe he’s grown out of his temper.” Armont’s flat yet curious eyes flicked up and down Carver, considering him. “You can find Cahill most mornings about this time at The Flame restaurant down on South Loop. He’s probably having breakfast there as usual, trying to suck up again to Verna Blaney, one of the waitresses.”

“Was Cahill involved with this waitress?”

“For a while he seemed to be; then whatever was going on cooled off, at least with Verna. It’s the sort of thing folks around here would notice and probably make too much of. Myself, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was nothing between Verna and Cahill but acquaintanceship. Verna’s dad, Ned Blaney, ran airboat rides for tourists through the swamp south of town before he died of a heart attack nine months ago. People wondered what would happen to Verna. She got the job at The Flame, and she’s still living out on her hundred or so godforsaken acres in the ramshackle swamp cabin she and her dad shared before he died. She’s a good woman, maybe went a little touchy and withdrawn after Ned died, then she seemed to right herself.” Armont recrossed his arms; he was done talking, finished with his own gesture of cooperation.

Carver thanked him for the information and started toward the door.

“You were a cop once, weren’t you?” Armont asked, in a way that made it clear he knew the answer.

Carver turned, leaning on the cane. “That’s right. In Orlando.”

“It shows,” Armont said. His tone suggested he was complimenting Carver, in his own begrudging manner. He sat down heavily behind his desk and got busy in a rough way with paperwork that apparently had him frustrated. “You’ll keep me informed,” he said.

Carver said that he would.

Armont didn’t look up from the disorganized spread of papers on his desk. He drew a plastic ballpoint pen from his shirt pocket, and with powerful darting motions of his big right hand, he began gouging signatures into some of the papers. A man who attacked his work.

Carver continued out of the office. He nodded to the uniformed patrolman at one of the desks, and to the elderly woman at the switchboard, when they looked over at him as he limped past. They nodded back. The woman smiled in grandmotherly fashion, as if she’d like to pat Carver on the head, give him some cookies, and fix his leg. She looked as if she might actually be able to do that.

Carver levered himself into the sun-heated Olds, wincing as his bare hand pressed too long against the baked vinyl upholstery. The car’s top was up, but the sun had invaded through the windshield and rolled-down side windows.

He drove from the police-department lot, then down Loop Avenue to The Flame restaurant. After making a U-turn, he parked the Olds behind Sam Cahill’s gleaming red Corvette and smiled. Time for breakfast. Bacon, eggs, and information. The Flame was a white clapboard building close to the curb on Loop Avenue. It had a long, green-tinted window that featured a fancy decal of a dancing flame above the restaurant’s name in red letters. Through the window Carver could see several tables and booths, and a long serving counter with stools. There appeared to be about a dozen customers inside, most of them at the tables or booths.

One of those electrified insect traps that attract and then zap bugs on contact was hung above The Flame’s entrance. War was hell, even war on insects. Carver stepped gingerly through the previous night’s bounty of crisp casualties and went inside.

He sat at a table near the counter, not far from one of the big ceiling fans that were rotating their broad blades too slowly to stir any air. A huge antique jukebox was playing a country-western tune, a sincere lament that had to do with cowboys and trucks and desperately unhappy rich women. The place was old, slightly worn at the edges, but it looked prosperous in a small way and clean, except for the insects. Carver felt better about ordering breakfast there.

Two men in jeans and work shirts sat at the counter, sipping coffee. A man and a young blond boy with a mouthful of braces were in one of the tape-patched booths, and an older couple sat at a table near the back. Some teen-agers giggled not far from them. No one in there looked as if he might be Sam Cahill.

A squarish, gray-haired woman bustled out of the kitchen, carrying a tray with platters of eggs and toast on it. She took the tray to the table where the man and boy sat. While the boy went at the eggs, the man smiled and thanked her, called her Emma. Which meant the dark-haired woman behind the counter was probably Verna Blaney.

Carver studied the counter waitress while she drew a refill of coffee from a tall stainless-steel urn. She was older than he’d expected, in her mid-thirties. Slender yet somehow sturdy. He suspected she was built with deceptive lushness beneath her ill-fitting white waitress uniform, the sort of peasant-stock voluptuousness that used to play hell with princes. Her hair was thick, pinned up and back, and would probably fall to shoulder length when she let it down. She turned to set the cups on the counter and Carver got the full impact of her broad-featured face. Her eyes were brown and set far apart, beneath unplucked brows that almost met above a broad, perfectly aligned nose. She had vaguely Slavic, prominent cheekbones, and her wide lips were full, slightly inverted to reveal even, very white teeth. She was feminine, not close to beautiful, but there was a coarse sensuality about her. The air around her seemed to hum with vibrations aimed at the male libido.

She turned in the other direction then, and Carver saw the wide, ugly scar that disfigured the right side of her face. Raised and red, it ran from her misshapen ear, down her cheek, and curved beneath her jaw.

Her eyes met Carver’s, didn’t look away. A direct stare, almost daring him to react to the scar. She was probably a woman direct in everything, one who had come to accept her disfigurement and alternate futures not lived.

“Yes, sir?” Emma said. She was standing alongside Carver’s table.

She waited while he glanced over the menu, then she licked a pencil point and jotted in her note pad as he ordered the Gator Special and coffee. He could swear she gave him a crocodile smile.

As Emma walked away, a man came out of the rest room and strode toward the counter, absently checking to make sure his fly was zipped. “Leavin’, Sam?” Emma asked.

“Not yet, sexy,” the man said. He sat down on a stool close to the far end of the counter. Without being asked, Verna poured a cup of coffee with cream and carried it down to him. Sam Cahill. Had to be.

He didn’t look much like Carver had imagined. He was tall and rangy, in his mid-forties but still lean, in good shape. A cigarette-ad cowboy in jeans and a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Not the sort who’d sell Sun South units. Did he have an act for each set of customers? Was he the polished smooth-talker for wealthy Sun South buyers, then rough-hewn and one of the boys for the swamptown property he was selling now?

Verna stayed near the end of the counter, leaning on it, and they talked. Carver couldn’t understand what they were saying, but they didn’t seem particularly intimate. There were no lingering looks, no magnetic gestures that prompted and prolonged contact. But Carver noticed that she did keep left and front face toward Cahill, concealing the scar.

After about five minutes, Verna wiped down the counter around Cahill’s coffee cup and walked away, finding things to keep her busy behind the counter. Things she’d just as soon be doing as talking to Cahill. Whatever fire there had been between them, if indeed there had been one, seemed to have burned itself out.

Even before Emma brought Carver’s Gator Special, Cahill got up and strolled out of the restaurant. A still-busy Verna saw him leaving, from the corner of her eye, and waved, managing to keep her scar toward the wall. He nodded an easy good-bye to her, his western boots thunking out a slow rhythm on the floor.

It would have attracted attention to walk out of the restaurant after Cahill without having eaten breakfast. Carver stayed where he was; he knew what Cahill looked like now and could find him easily enough. He wondered about the woman who might have been Cahill’s lover.

Carver ate his eggs, bacon, and toast, drank his orange juice and coffee. It was the kind of salty, greasy breakfast he liked more than was good for him. If he hung around Solarville, he’d return to The Flame for the food if nothing else.

Verna doubled as the cashier. Carver stood up from the table and picked up his check, which somehow had gotten wet at one corner in the way of restaurant checks, and limped over to where the register sat on the counter. The restaurant floor was waxed linoleum, tricky to walk on with the cane.

When she sensed him standing there, Verna turned from the grill she was scraping with an oversized iron spatula and wiped her hands on a towel. She looked at the check. Close to him now on the other side of the counter, she gave off a soapy but vaguely musky scent that cut through the restaurant’s smells of fried grease and perked coffee, like a perspiring athlete not long after her shower.

“Can I still get an airboat ride outside of town?” Carver asked.

“Not anymore,” she said. “Three seventy-six with tax.”

“I rode an airboat here about a year ago,” Carver went on. “I remember you from then.”

She raised her head and gave him a neutral, distant look. “My dad used to take tourists out on those rides. He’s dead now.”

“I’m sorry,” Carver said, and laid a five-dollar bill on the counter. “An accident?”

“Heart attack.” The neutral expression remained.

“Hearts cause a lot of grief. Sometimes I think it would be better if people had been designed without them.”

Verna said nothing as she counted out his change. Then she told him, “Thanks, come again” in the voice of an automaton, and she laboriously resumed scraping the grill. Her efforts made a sound he could feel in the edges of his teeth.

Carver left a tip for Emma and went outside to his car.

He’d driven halfway back to the motel, along the tree-lined narrow road, when the Olds’s front end dipped and it tried to veer to the right, down an embankment and into the swamp.

Carver yanked the steering wheel left and the car crossed the road and almost plunged down the other embankment. It had developed a yen for an accident. It bounced, skidded, fishtailed, a vehicle with a mind of its own, bent on suicide.

He wrestled the slick steering wheel, feeling it slip in his sweaty grasp.

Finally he braked the big car to a stop, half off the right shoulder of the road, and switched off the ignition.

After sitting still for a few minutes, calming down, he got out and stared at the flat right front tire. There was no clue as to what had made it suddenly lose air. He probed the misshapen tire with the tip of his cane, as if checking for signs of life. The faint scent of heated rubber wafted up to him.

Though it was still late morning, the sun and dampness were of the intensity that sapped the energy from a man changing a tire on a dusty road. Or from one thinking about changing a tire. Carver already felt half melted and unenthusiastic. But there was very little traffic on the road, so the odds of being able to flag down a car, so he could ask the driver to send back a mechanic to change the tire, were long.

The clouds of insects that had invaded the motel were there, too. Carver brushed away one of the insistent little bugs as it buzzed around his mouth and tried to flit up a nostril. Then he sighed and walked around to open the trunk and see if the spare still held air; he hadn’t checked it in months.

He was about to insert the key in the trunk lock when a car rounded the bend, slowed, and pulled onto the shoulder a hundred feet beyond the Olds. It was a plain white Ford Escort, the kind used frequently for rental cars in the area. When it stopped, its cloud of dust caught up with it, and the driver waited until the haze settled before opening the door.

A young Latino got out of the Escort. He was wearing a red short-sleeved shirt and dark blue, grease-stained pants. Maybe he was a mechanic. He gave a movie- bandito smile beneath a drooping, ragged mustache as he approached Carver. His teeth were bad. His dusty feet were clad in leather sandals that flopped wildly as he walked, yet he moved very gracefully.

“Trouble, hey?” he said. He looked both ways on the deserted road.

“Flat tire,” Carver said. “I think the spare has air in it.”

The man nodded, still smiling. Pancho Villa with charm. His dark eyes took in the cane and Carver’s stiff left knee. He reached beneath his shirt and drew out a long folding knife, the sort used to cut produce. Metal clicked on metal as, with a deft twist of his wrist, he flipped the knife open. The blade caught the sun.

He was no stranger to knives. This one nestled like a deadly pet in his right hand.

Holding the gleaming blade straight up and far out in front of him at eye level, as if it were a mystical object magically drawing him forward, leading him where it wanted him to go, he began to move in on Carver.